The Failure of Traditional Remote Office Data Protection

Remote offices and branch offices are particularly vulnerable to data loss, and it’s hard for corporate IT to support them. Enter… cloud-based data protection.

Server backup from remote offices and back offices (ROBO) is time consuming, cumbersome, and expensive. With the increase in the amount of data being backed up and retained for litigation and for regulation reasons, large organizations see a lot of corporate data at risk. Scalability and data growth challenges result in very high costs for backup and archival storage, in some cases 6 to 10 times higher than just a few years ago.

Protecting that amount of remote data requires a seismic shift in protection technologies. However, few backup offerings are up to snuff. Most depend on replicating to disaster recovery sites, installing twin backup appliances at both the ROBO and the data center, or using backup software to backup over the wide area network (WAN). These are problems, given huge data growth; slow, un-optimized WANs affect backup and recovery speeds, and it’s hard to assign effective responsibility for multiple sites.

This is a problem that traditional backup and storage vendors created. They are working with old code and big installed bases; given their existing investments, it’s not a problem they are likely to fix.

There’s another item influencing the manner in which organizations ensure data integrity in the users they serve outside company headquarters: The remote office is changing in ways that make it possible to introduce new backup technologies.

First, Internet bandwidth is getting better. Previously, most branches had T1 (1.5Mbps) access; now it’s quite common to see 100Mbps Internet access. That improved connectivity makes it possible to back up to the cloud – as well as to use the cloud for other data-intensive uses, including those relying on large data sets.

To top it all, continued IT budget tightening hits remote offices especially hard – and it is common to see branches lack onsite dedicated IT personnel. Server admins therefore have to manage remote offices from a central location, which means they need efficient ways and low-touch means of backing up servers.

These changes make it possible to provide a new way to back up servers – straight to the cloud.

Not Just Any Cloud

IT is not stuck with risky and expensive remote backup. With the cloud, organizations can access a distributed computing model that connects corporate and ROBO into a well-managed whole. This model starts with a modern cloud – not just any cloud, but one that enables a business-wide operating model.

Traditional clouds have issues, such as proprietary cloud infrastructures, no global deduplication, and few locations. Plus, they’re expensive to scale. In contrast, a well designed and scalable cloud is an efficient way of buying and scaling computing resources. Those resources can distribute and connect vast computing resources across an entire organization.

The cloud is far beyond a cheap storage tier for creaking older data. It is distributed, open within user access rules, scalable, easily manageable, and fault tolerant. This cloud can scale with the business, and it can transform your remote backup process.

Endpoint and ROBO data protection are the hard jobs that traditional storage vendors try to do – but with their old code, they don’t do it well. Druva spearheaded the technology and cloud model that gets next-generation endpoint and ROBO protection to the businesses that desperately need it.

As you might imagine, Druva has something in mind to address this issue – and to make life easier for every ROBO user as well as the IT departments that support them. Stay tuned.